All Set For Version 2 ?

One of the '-ities' I rarely see discussed is maintainability
Are companies so focussed on getting Version 1 to work that they don't think about what happens if it's a success and has customers clamouring for Version 2 ?

As an ex-programmer I am embarrassed about some of the code I left behind and whenever I feel my ears burning I know that some poor programmer is trying to work out what the heck I had for breakfast that day to produce such a mess

Taking over someone else's code was one of the bugbears of being a programmer
Was the code a complete nightmare where you just wanted to start from scratch and rewrite it all ? Or had the code been written by an uber-geek using advanced programming concepts that you'd never come across and you didn't even know which file to start looking at and even if you did the contents seemed to be written in some alien language ?

Given that most projects spend most of their life in maintenance mode then shouldn't testing to see if the code can be easily maintained be a priority ? Or at the very least, something that is thought about ?

Maybe I've just been unlucky and worked on the wrong projects where it's never done but the regular readers of The Daily WTF seem bored with having horrific code samples sent in

Anyone considering maintenance, please leave a comment
And I'll see if anyone on the Software Testing Club does it